LANESSA LONG

Hello! I'm Lanessa...

I am a musician, writer, songstress, and comedian based out of LA, and my favorite question to be asked as an artist is: “so what is it you really do?”

I have a solo musical comedy show called, “Nobody’s Really Helped Me” that I premiered at California Institute of the Arts, and have put up at the Hollywood Fringe Festival, The Curious Comedy Theatre, The Free Festival at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and the United Solo Theatre Festival. It’s been awarded The Best of the Broadwater (HFF 2018) and nominated for the Larry Cornwall Award for Musical Excellence (HFF 2018) and Best Improv by the world’s largest solo theatre festival in NYC (USTF 2018). The show is full the angst being 22 and freshly out of art school creates and finding identity amidst it. After seeing it, LA Music Critic said: “Long is a natural comedienne..” I’ll be doing it for the LA Women’s Theatre Festival in the spring of 2019.

I’ve also performed and toured my original music in Portland, Los Angeles, and England, and released my 5 track self-titled EP in 2016.

I got my BFA at the California Institute of the Arts, where I majored in music and minored in creative writing. I am also actively involved with the Upright Citizens Brigade in Los Angeles, and am a mother of two birds named Martha and Patricia.

Artist statement

I remember when I was a kid, driving in the car with my mom and saying something that made her laugh. And then I started laughing because she was laughing - that kind of laugh that hits you in the pit of your stomach, that you feel in your abs, where you feel you can’t gasp enough breath before indulging in another one. The kind of laugh that gives you wrinkles at the corners of your mouth and at the sides of your eyes from smiling. Sometimes there’s a kind of laughter where you don’t feel like crying, so you laugh instead. Or the kind of laugh that you do when there’s an uncomfortable silence, so you fill it with something comfortable. Sometimes there’s laughing, laughing that feels like swimming up to the surface to take a break from the pains that you’ll inevitably experience. Laughter is what connects us, and what brings us together. It is addictive and contagious and communal. We laugh in pitches we can’t speak in, and I think that’s because there aren’t words to convey joy or express happiness, or relieve us from pain, or to help us process hurting, in the way that laughter does.

In that car ride with my mom, I remember saying, “Mom, I love to make people laugh!”.

And it seems that, whenever I lack direction, I must come down to the purest sense of who I am and what I hope to give. And that is the hope that I will bring you joy. I want to bring you happiness, I want to give you the kind of relief that feels like flipping your pillow over to the cooler side on a hot night’s sleep. The kind of moment that feels like it does when you stay at the table at a restaurant for an extra minute after closing time. The kind of moment that feels like when you hug someone and let go, but they hold on for one more breath. I want to bring you moments of peace, of light, of laughter.

This show is a lot of me. Sometimes (all the time) it’s hard to want to use who we are to help other people think, feel, and laugh. But, I know myself best, and in anything I make, that is me, giving to you to do whatever you want with.